Bringing the Silk Road to the Upper West Side

By Nadia Sussman
A new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History features art and ideas that traveled farther than any living person of their time.

Traveling the Silk Road: Ancient Pathways to a Modern World tells the story of vibrant Asian trade networks that linked China to the Mediterranean from AD 600 to AD 1200. The exhibit, which opened Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History, leads visitors along fabric-lined paths through artifacts from ancient China, central Asia and the Middle East.

In ancient Persia, Karez systems let water flow in underground tunnels making the desert livable. Today in Iran there are over 50,000 karez water systems.

While Europeans plodded through the Dark Ages, Asian merchants traded everything from pigments, furs and patchouli oil to religions and calligraphy.  Some items traveled 4,600 miles along Silk Road routes before reaching their final destinations.

“It really was kind of the first real attempt at globalization,” said curator Mark Norell, a dinosaur paleontologist and Silk Road expert.  Norell has been fascinated with the Silk Road since childhood.  For the first time, he said, people regularly purchased goods at market without knowing who made them or how they were made.

The show begins with humble silkworms — two live baskets full — and ends with modern numerals, the astrolabe, and speedy Arab ships.  In between, it stops to showcase the arts and markets of Xi’an in China, Turfan in western China, Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan, and Baghdad, Iraq.

A replica of a Tang-era loom holds a partially-finished silk. The original loom sits in the China National Silk Museum in Hangzhou.

During the Tang Dynasty, the capital city of Xi’an housed more than a million people.  It was a cosmopolitan center, home to immigrants from Central Asia and India.  A video in the exhibit’s Xi’an section demystifies the process of spinning silk from the cocoons of caterpillars, while a replica of a Tang-era loom shows hundreds of delicate threads meshing in a single bolt of cloth.

Down the path in the Turfan sectin, stalls in a night market scene display pelts, fruits and semi-precious stones under a canopy of grape vines.  A thousand years later, Turfan remains a wine-growing region.

“The world is a caravansarai with one entrance and one exit.   Every day, new people come to the caravansarai,” reads a quote from Persian poet Omar Khayyam in the Samarkand display.   This portion of the exhibit details the business of accommodations for travelers along the silk road.  Three animated videos of Silk Road stories, including “The Goose that Laid Golden Eggs,” play on an oversized, storybook-shaped screen.

The Baghdad section features a working model of an astrolabe, as well as calligraphy and ceramics.
Four life-sized camel models, three lashed in a caravan and laden with goods, show what it took to beat so many miles of paths, through deserts and snow.  The exhibit will run through August 15, 2010. (photos by Nadia Sussman)